Social Question

Hypocrisy_Central's avatar

If the future social direction in the US was corporate communities, how would you embrace it?

Asked by Hypocrisy_Central (26879points) March 18th, 2015

In another thread concerning driving and the cost to remain doing it thereof, some expressed they could not give up their vehicle because they live too far from where they work. What if in the future society went the way of corporate communities, major companies had pods of communities that their workers would live in or could buy houses in, thus keeping them close enough to work, to walk or have less than a 30 minute commute. However, if you changed jobs, quit, or was fired, you would have to move to the community of your next employer or a way community if your employer was not a major corporation with its own community. How would you embrace such a set up?

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11 Answers

David_Achilles's avatar

I would not embrace this at all! No way, no how. This is why we as a nation, that is the United States of America, need to have better mass transit options.

Jaxk's avatar

The only image I can bring up is the old mining communities that Tennessee Ernie Ford sang about. It only works where the work is in an isolated area, miners, lumberjacks, stuff like that. I suppose commercial sailors have a similar issue, you must live on the ship. Otherwise I don’t see anything on the horizon that would employ such tactics.

Hypocrisy_Central's avatar

@Jaxk Otherwise I don’t see anything on the horizon that would employ such tactics.
You cannot see any significant number of people taking it? That someone would think they can have a 30 min commute or less, no rat race on the freeway, sleep in an extra 45 minutes, have their kids going to school within walking distance or easily picked up on the way home, and close shopping? I am sure some of those fighting gridlock everyday might embrace it.

Espiritus_Corvus's avatar

These places are owned and controlled by the company you would be working for. That means that there is a monopoly on all goods and services within that environment. You pay their price for rent on your home and their prices for food and necessities in their stores.

If you lose your job, you lose not only your income, but your home and then are forced to move away from your community—forced to absorb the cost of relocation at a time when you can least afford it. Security may prevent you from returning for visits as you no longer have business there, just like they do when one is terminated from and office position. In the case of what is effectively banishment from your community, it would mean estrangement from friends and possibly even family—on top of all your other losses. They have these places around the isolated oil fields in the Venezuelan interior (Shell Oil) and around the mines in South Africa. Corporations are not democracies and there is no reason to believe the living environments the corporations provide their workers would be democracies. The ones in S.A. (a democracy) and Venezuela certainly aren’t.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

canidmajor's avatar

This is not a new concept at all, as @Espiritus_Corvus points out. Unions were formed and labor laws enacted to break away from these sorts of things. It took a long time for the term “factory housing” to not be commonplace.

And now, @Espiritus_Corvus, I have that as an ear worm. Thanks. ;-)

CWOTUS's avatar

If you suppose that this is a realistic or even possible living arrangement in the diverse (economically, racially, culturally and socially, and with subcultures among even those major groupings) society that we now enjoy (or suffer from, depending on your outlook), then I would have to wonder what your actual experience is with “the USA as it is”. I just don’t see this happening without major, cataclysmic-type upheavals in our society that would be so fundamentally altering of “life as it is” as to make prediction impossible. People enjoy their ability to make a living and still not have to give up their lives. I work with people who come from city apartments, from farms, from small and large towns, from cabins in the woods, and even a few who live on boats – and work together (for now – any of us can leave at any time for other work or for retirement or various other reasons) in a common location that is convenient to the employer. But the employer hardly cares where we live, as long as we can make it to work more or less on time and do our jobs.

Which is not to say “this is impossible”, because we know that for some these things have already happened. Indian reservations exist, divided along tribal lines – and not always tied to “ancestral lands”, either, but depending on the whims of the political leaders who established them, some of them over two hundred years ago. In addition to that, there was the Japanese-American internment of WWII years. However, in each of those cases the segregation was directed and enforced militarily.

Aside from that, religious communities, cooperative societies and communes are part of American history, from the Chataquas to the transcendentalist movement of the 19th century – and on through to the Mormons, who created a religiously-governed territory that became the State of Utah. Even so, communes fall apart as the families grow up and children take on different ideas and ideals from their parents, or finances collapse the economic underpinnings, or religious leaders have to modify their “separateness” enough to fit into the legal and political framework that is the United States.

“Company towns” have existed and still do exist – barely – in some areas such as @Jaxk has suggested: mining towns and “new” oil patch towns in North Dakota (or old towns under new management as the oil and gas companies import workers to man the rigs and support those workers). These also exist in remote areas of Canada, as well as elsewhere in the world.

In addition, this is how a lot of American and European expatriates currently work overseas in the Middle East, India and to a lesser degree in many other Asian nations. (Probably Africa, too, but I don’t have that experience.)

However, these are all “exceptional” communities. They aren’t at all normal and when the project is built, the mine played out or the oil extracted, the towns typically fall apart. (In the case of project-related housing built for construction workers, some plant owners who own that housing sell it to “regular” citizens who would like to move there and establish a civil society in a “planned development” town – with varying degrees of success, I would imagine. I simply cannot even conceive of a society where people will voluntarily segregate themselves along “corporate” lines unless there is a very strong incentive for them to do so. Where’s the incentive going to come from? Why would American corporations – who can hire at will from around the country (and sometimes even from around the world) – choose to pay a premium to attract workers “to live in a ghetto” when there is no other economic reason for them to do so?

It’s fine to posit strange, new, unusual and even fantastic scenarios for how societies might develop along alternative lines, but generally the development has to have some kind of rational or quasi-rational basis. What’s your theory for “WHY” this type of society would evolve?

Darth_Algar's avatar

A town where the the municipality has no vested interest in the residents and the residents have no stake or say-so in the town? Ugh. Count me out.

rojo's avatar

This is why we need unions.

Jaxk's avatar

@Hypocrisy_Central – What you describe is communal living and whether it be government controlled or corporate it is socialism. No free market nor competition. The controlling entity owns everything so there are no personal property rights. Prisons are run this way and the prisoners have a surprisingly short commute. A 30–60 minute commute is a small price to pay for individual freedom. I think I’ll pass and I don’t need a union to tell me to do so. Besides, I love my car.

Kropotkin's avatar

What you describe is a lot like a model village, built by very rich factory owners and industrialists during the 1800s

@Jaxk It also has about nothing to do with socialism. Socialism is the complete opposite of government or corporate control.

And where do you get the idea that there are no personal property rights in socialism? Personal property is pretty much the cornerstone of socialist theories of property. The earliest and one of the most influential socialist and anarchist thinkers, Jean Pierre Proudhon, wrote a treatise on property rights in What is Property? where he pretty much argues for personal property as the basis of a socialist (specifically mutualist, but used by various other types of socialists, and even Marx) economic system.

Finally, to answer the question. Although I think it would be better, less ecologically damaging, less polluting, less energy and resource intensive, to live at or near one’s work—I wouldn’t have it under this suggested system of a corporate entity owning and controlling one’s habitation.

Even if it were more comfortable—and I’m sure the Victorian Era factory workers appreciated some of the comforts they had in their model villages—it seems obnoxiously paternalistic and even oppressive.

I would not wish to be beholden to, and dependent on a boss or owner for my housing. Even worse with the threat of losing that home if I were fired or couldn’t work for some reason.

cazzie's avatar

I would incorporate myself and establish a commune in my name.

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